Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

Yes He or She might be in a position to clarify something or they might take something away to help improve their process.

However, in this case the CEO responded privately to me by email in October 2006 when I first published the blog post.

In his response at the time he specifically referred to the blog post.

For some bizarre reason he decided, out of the blue, to start a debate about the blog post again in February 2008. That he did so is strange enough. But the manner in which he did so, where he made unfounded , false personal allegations about me, speaks volumes about his ability as a CEO.

@Tom, perhaps he responded to the comment that was left this year to ensure it (in his mind anyway) didn’t drag on. Note that I’m not taking sides here - just commenting on that CEOs should get involved in the conversation (which isn’t disagreeing with you either).

Ok that sounds like I’m being politically correct, but everyone knows that’s not me

Paul, don’t get me wrong. I have absolutely no problem with the CEO getting involved in a situation like this. In fact, I would typically encourage it. My problem is that he chose to lie about me and to hurl personal insults. This doesn’t bother me personally. Plenty of people insult me!!! What it does do is it blackens the Blueface brand and it makes Feargal look bad.

If I were advising him I would have told him to leave a comment along the lines of

Tom, I am very sorry you had issues with our product. We have made many changes and improvements to our infrastructure in the last 14 months since you had these issues. I would love to have you try our service again and see for yourself just how much it has improved

Those kind of sentiments would go a lot further, and would make the Blueface company look far better than trying to smear me with personal insults and falsehoods.

Paul

It’s an interesting question. I’ve been mulling over your post for the past couple of days and I’ll probably follow it up when my thoughts are a bit more coherent

Michele

"Should the CEO get involved in an online debate about their brand?
"Yes, yes, yes, YES!"

Paul, I think you may have accidentally omitted the final sentence of the paragraph?

"But senior executives ought to remember that such exchanges are in the public domain and therefore ensure all responses are polite, helpful and, above all, professional!"

hth

@HeavyLight - absolutely, couldn’t agree more. Perhaps I went to the extreme by not articulating how a CEO should respond.

I’d disagree. If CEOs always responded in a manner that was universally acceptable you’d all complain ….
Isn’t it more refreshing to get an honest reply instead?

@Michele I agree. What I meant earlier, is that you can be honest, to the point, blunt and cutting (like you and I) yada yada yada… without being sarcastic, condescending or ignorant (which we all do by mistake from time to time).

You’ll always get some who just don’t know how to communicate properly - some would argue that I don’t

@Michele - while I too dislike anodyne, please-all statements from company representatives, the CEO highlighted in the account on Tom’s blog could have got his point across to it’s wider readership far more effectively had he left his emotions at the door.

And as you’ve brought it up, I particularly didn’t want to call his honesty into question as I suspect (and hope that) Blueface has mistaken Tom for another, less co-operative, ex-customer.

Paul - aye. The problem is that some people will expect CEOs to cow tow to them constantly. I’m a firm believer in firing customers when required

Michele

@Michele - agreed. I consult major brands on this stuff and my reason for them to have a blog is so they can either

1. apologise
2. explain themselves or
3. defend their position and explain to commentators why they are wrong.

@HeavyLight - so we’re back to a specific CEO now. I thought we could keep it general here. No hope eh

In this case, yes, it would be refreshing to get an honest response from the CEO!!!His every comment contained some lie, personal insult or blatantly false allegation.

As I said previously, this only reflected poorly on himself personally and the Blueface brand which he represents, as well.

There are many, far more appropriate responses he could have made. Dissing a former customer in a public forum never looks good. But lying in the process and being caught out doing so is unforgivable.

@Paul - the focus on a particular ceo is probably helped by your explicit reference in your post
People commenting on these things only get to see a very small part of the picture. Regardless of which companies are involved. Companies such as ourselves have to respect the data privacy legislation, which means that we cannot share the full story in public ever.

Michele

@Michele "the focus on a particular ceo is probably helped by your explicit reference in your post"

True. It just happens that the same people are commentating on both posts. I purposely didn’t link to Tom’s post as to not detract from the general question.

That’s not to say that Tom’s post isn’t a very interesting one, because it is.

By the way, I outed the Blueface CEO for lying on my blog.

If he had any proof that he wasn’t lying, data privacy laws or no, I’d be receiving a takedown notice quicker than you can say "liar, liar pants on fire!"

As a complete aside, commenting on this site with Firefox keeps my paragraph spacing, comments left above in Safari lose all paragraph info!

Thought you should know.

@Tom - Thanks, I’ll have that looked into as soon as possible. I hope I did you proud with my edit in the meantime

Aw, nice one, thanks Paul. That looks a lot better.

One request, can you drop a couple of paragraph breaks into my first comment too?

Cheers

What’s with all the "nofollow" stuff?

@Michele - who are you talking to and what do you mean by ‘nofollow’?

Paul - you

All the links to commenter’s sites are marked as "nofollow"
See: http://www.mneylon.com/blog/archives/2006/05/30/why-no-follow-sucks/

Michele,

As far as i know “nofollow” does not prevent a search engine to index or scroll the comments. Google says it doesn’t but if you use web master tools, you will see they do index, Google don’t scroll but Yahoo,MSN and Ask do.  “nofollow” just excludes the links from Googles ranking calculation. Here is an article by Loren Baker from search engine journal that explains in depth “nofollow” vs. “Search engine”.

A genuine contribution is priceless, but should a page rank calculation prevent them from contributing? Wikipedia uses “nofollow”, which doesn’t stop genuine contributions.

Thats my take.

Kamrul
Wikipedia’s "nofollow" was a recent change and has come under a lot of criticism from SEO professionals.
The entire idea behind no follow is to tell Google et al not to follow the link, so it impacts SEO negatively.
I and others are more than happy to share link juice on our blogs and I’m quite surprised and disappointed that Paul doesn’t want to
Michele

@Michele - I hope you’d assume that I would always show the link love. In fact, I’ve been linking your name in my own comments to see if it would increase the link-love for you.

I had no idea what nofollow was until you brought it to my attention. Could you help Kamrul better understand how to implement it in a security-conscious way?

There’s no security issues that I’m aware of. If you’re moderating your comments sanely you won’t have any issues

The only reason some of the software developers turned on "nofollow" by default was to thrawt comment spammers.
As far as I know there are a couple of plugins for Wordpress that will "magically" remove the "nofollow" reference or you could simply hack the template. The plugin might make maintenance easier however

Michele

@Michele we only moderate the first comment you make as it tells us that you’re (at least in part) human.

Kamrul’s concern is that the noflow could tell Google that we’re link farms. This can have a serious impact on their ranking of our own site. Not that we’ve ever been bothered by Google Ranking anyway. Kamrul and Aido are looking into this.

Would be great to get feedback from Donncha

That’s rubbish tbh

I’ve got "follow" on all comment links on all my blogs (both personal and business)
If you have a look at the post I linked to earlier and some of the other posts linked to it you’ll see a lot of people are doing "follow"

@Michele - could be why your Google rank is so low?

I don’t mean that sarcastically. I really want to provide as many outbound links as possible. I just want to be sure we get it right before we make changes to a bunch of blogs that I author.

Nah. My Google rank is low because I sold text links in the footer. Since they’re paying enough to cover my car repayments they’re staying

@Michele - shame your hosting isn’t as cheap LOL

Google PR doesn’t really matter anymore anyway

@Paul - as cheap as what / who?
/me is confused

@Michele - as cheap as you selling links